It’s an exciting time to be an engineer. With companies today moving faster than ever, engineering teams are developing and deploying new code daily, continuously improving and advancing the business. But while the pace of modern development creates new opportunities for engineering teams, it introduces new challenges as well—in particular, making sure new code releases don’t bring the system crashing down. With more code comes more opportunity for error.
When organizations scale fast, the challenges compound. As the engineering team grows to keep pace with expanding business, it becomes more difficult to keep track of the new code being developed. This lack of visibility can frustrate even the best teams. Without a clear view into what changes are being made, it becomes more difficult to fix them when something goes wrong.
What do you do? Here are five key DevOps practices critical for organizations scaling fast:
Put a Premium on Collaboration and Communication
DevOps teams, no matter their size, need to be able to share information easily and quickly. When a problem occurs, forensics and root cause analysis must be performed as fast as possible, and engineers need to be able to annotate events that occur within the product deployment stream. Most companies already have the tools to do this, but they often fail to communicate what they find. Opening lines of communication between disparate, often geographically dispersed teams enables everyone to expand beyond their own knowledge base and capabilities to help one another. When everyone can share their knowledge, it raises the collective talent of the entire engineering community, creating a more collaborative learning environment and a culture of sharing.
Democratize the Tools
Tools that are accessible only to a small group of power users always fail. There’s not a person in the world who wants to put hours into teaching themselves a new tool if it isn’t approachable and interesting. That’s trouble, because the fewer people that understand how to use a given tool, the more difficult it is to use it to fix a problem. For example, if the ability to query log files is limited to the three engineers who are certified on a tool, the size of your team won’t matter; you can have 50,000 of the best engineers, but effectively, it’s a team of three. This bottleneck can have serious business consequences. Imagine you’re an online retailer having your biggest sale of the year and your website crashes. Every minute you spend finding an authorized user is a minute lost, and when the internet is your business, time is quite literally money.
Spread Recognition of Value
No one wants their work to go unnoticed, but recognition is a learned practice and one that requires continued focus. DevOps teams and their work save their organizations vast amounts of time and money, and business leaders should take care to highlight the value of their team’s successes, both internally and externally. Not only does it encourage their teams to work harder and smarter, impacting the entire organization, but it also lifts up DevOps teams everywhere, publicizing best practices to outside teams and creating an exponential impact across the entire engineering community.
Don’t Just Expect Change, Embrace It
Innovation generally happens for two reasons: The tools being used to solve problems aren’t working, or the problems you’re trying to solve have changed. Every day, companies get frozen in time—the tools they use may work now, but the world around them is changing. It’s easy to get caught in a cycle of developing new products, but what if the tools your business uses to solve problems are out of date? When engineers make changes in the code, they must be in lockstep with every other department, from QA to customer service. Organizations that embrace change always will have a leg up on the competition.
Capture Your Knowledge Base
As business scales, their teams scale with them. What once may have been a two- or three-person DevOps team becomes a 40 person machine, and with scale comes a lack of coordination. More and more, DevOps teams are scattered across the globe, in offices and remote, and no two people have the same workflow. In this fragmented environment, it becomes imperative for companies to keep a store of knowledge their engineers can reference wherever they are, whenever they need to.
Fostering a strong DevOps culture isn’t easy, but it’s necessary. At its core, DevOps is about collaboration and communication—companies that treat each team as separate units risk siloing their employees, creating closed information channels that are difficult to break through in times of crisis. Whether you’re pushing new code or bringing your business back online, timing is everything and engineers need to be able to move at the speed of business. These five tips won’t fix your code or craft new features, but they’ll certainly ease the process.
— Dave McAllister
